Trying to reach a friend by phone the other day, I got the busy signal five times in a row. The first few times I fumed—there’s something about that frustrating buzz that sets my nerves on edge—but by the fourth try I was amused, remembering how, just a few days before, she and I had been on the phone at least half an hour, talking about a party we’d both been to.

It’s here at last—relief for your throbbing dialing finger. Just slip this plastic card into Bell Labs’ experimental dialer phone and the number is dialed automatically. The card could also be used to transmit information over telephone lines to computers, or even to check bank balances.

Call Indicator for Telephone
THE numbers dialed on automatic telephones can now be recorded on a call indicator device invented by William Green-berg of Portland, Ore. In the center of the regular telephone dial is a space where the numbers being dialed are reproduced, showing what number is being called, and warning immediately of any error. Pressing a small button at the top of the device clears the figures for the next call.

This mobile telephone truck, equipped with six pay phones and a coin changer, can speed to any spot in Washington, D.C., where emergency phone service is needed in a hurry. Its crew just hooks it into existing wires.

While waiting for emergencies to call it into service, the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. uses the unit to collect dimes from stationary booths.

In the eye of a needle above is a transistor switch that can turn on or off in ten billionths of a second. It is an example of the micro-miniature devices that Western Electric makes today for the new Electronic Switching Systems now being put into service in the Bell telephone network.

Tired of dialing calls? Here’s an add-on that converts an ordinary dial phone for pushbutton signaling. The 5-1/4-inch sphere also has a memory for 10 frequently used numbers you can call with two buttons. Busy number? Just wait and push one button to repeat your call. Made by Pye in England.

Memory phone

Push one of Touch-a-matic’s 32 buttons and it places prerecorded phone numbers for you. An integrated-circuit memory (foreground) containing 15,000 transistors does the job. To store numbers, you push a “record” button, then the digits. Developed at Bell Labs, the new phones will appear in 1974.

I love it when writers with expertise in one area just throw in huge advances in other technologies as a possible result of another. Eg: What does a 3-D virtual conference room have to do with satellites? Would it not work with wires?

What the New Domestic COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES Will Do for You

Canada’s pioneering Aniks, and U.S. successors, are introducing the revolutionary innovation of overland telephone-and-TV relays in the sky. They promise bargain rates for long-distance phone calls, picture phones that everyone can afford—and better television programs, by way of novel kinds of TV networks

By WERNHER von BRAUN
PS Consulting Editor, Space

On Jan. 11, 1973, Rudy Pudluk, community manager of Resolute on a Canadian island above the Arctic Circle, made a long-distance phone call to Ottawa. The English-speaking Eskimo chatted with Gerard Pelletier, Minister of Communications, and with David Golden, president of Telesat Canada, whose system carried his voice across the frozen North.

Special cameras of new design are taking the place of human meter readers who check and record, each month, the number of telephone calls for which you are to be billed. In the larger cities, a single telephone central office may employ as many as 10,000 individual registers or meters, and teams of clerks have been required to read them. Photographing twenty-five meters at a time, the cameras give a quicker reading and one that is proof against error.